SpaceX's Starship Mark 1 vehicle, seen here being assembled Sept. 27 at the company's South Texas test site, could perform a suborbital test flight in as soon as one to two months, Elon Musk said in a Sept. 28 presentation.

SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said the company would start test flights of its next-generation Starship vehicle in as soon as one to two months and reach orbit in as little as six months, even as some complain the company is devoting too many resources to this project.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...